Overview
On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the trial of Brown v. Board of Education that it was unconstitutional for schools to segregate students on the basis of race. They argued against the South's practice of "separate but equal," which had previously been upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson. Even if the conditions of the separate schools were of equal quality, they argued, this form of segregation was wrong because "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." However, the Supreme Court's ruling neither offered nor mandated a plan for beginning the desegregation and integration processes in America's public schools. Nevertheless, previously all-white schools across the nation began to admit African American students, with varying levels of success.
In the North, where segregation had already been forbidden in many states for generations, this issue hardly surfaced. However, across the South and in areas of the Midwest and beyond, the attempt to integrate schools was sometimes met with disapproval, and at other times with outright unrest and protest. In Mississippi, for instance, when the first African American student, United States Air Force veteran and Civil Rights activist James Meredith, arrived on campus in 1962, riots broke out as segregationists protested his enrollment at Ole Miss. Based on the number of records, both primary and secondary, that are available pertaining to the desegregation of public schools and universities across the American South, it is easy to see that this incident was not an isolated one, but it was not the only experience.
Clemson University, by contrast, celebrates its purported narrative of "integration with dignity," largely because its administrators went to great lengths to ensure what happened at Ole Miss did not happen on Clemson's campus. But is that really the whole story? In this thematic research collection, I will sift through archival resources in an attempt to tell Clemson's integration story starting in 1963 and proceeding forward into the early half of the 1970s, primarily through the lens of the athletics department and the music program, in hopes of offering a small snapshot of the African American experience at Clemson University in the 1960s and 1970s.